In Search of an FDR Consensus: The Future of an American Foreign and Defense Policy

This article was previously published as part of The Reconstruction Papers. The entire book is available in print and as a PDF.

Get the complete audio of The Reconstruction Papers now on Spotify, on Apple, on Amazon, and elsewhere via its RSS feed.

I. The crisis of consensus

Something has gone badly wrong with American foreign and defense policy, and progressives know it, even if they struggle to agree on exactly what has gone wrong. The Iraq War exposed the hubris of liberal hawks and neoconservatives alike. The Afghanistan withdrawal, however necessary, illustrated the limits of military nation-building. The rise of China, the return of great-power competition, and the unraveling of alliances once thought permanent have left the foreign-policy establishment adrift, reaching reflexively for old tools in a world that no longer resembles the one those tools were built for. Meanwhile, the American public, tired of endless wars, skeptical of defense contractors, and increasingly consumed by domestic dysfunction and political polarization, has largely tuned out or become nihilistic. The result is a vacuum: a policy class without a mandate and a political left without a serious alternative to offer.

This is not merely a communication problem or a branding challenge. It is a structural failure of political imagination. For much of the past two decades, the foreign-policy debate in the United States has been conducted between two inadequate poles: a hawkish establishment that draws the wrong lessons from its own failures and a skeptical left that knows what it opposes but cannot articulate what it would do instead. Neither pole commands a democratic majority. Neither has produced a durable public consensus. And in the absence of such a consensus, the most irresponsible impulses in American politics—nationalist retrenchment on the right, reflexive anti-interventionism on the left—have been allowed to fill the space.

What America needs is not merely a better strategy or a smarter set of policies. It needs a new consensus, a durable, politically rooted, morally coherent framework for engaging with the world that can gain broad democratic support and sustain itself across election cycles. Such a consensus will not emerge from think tanks alone, or from the national-security bureaucracy, or from a Democratic Party still nursing the wounds of its own foreign-policy failures. It must be built, argued for, and earned, the way all great political settlements are. It must be built on honest foundations, with a clear-eyed understanding of what American power can and cannot accomplish, and with genuine accountability to the citizens who ultimately bear its costs.

History offers a guide. Eighty years ago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did something that seems almost unimaginable today: He forged a foreign-policy consensus that united isolationists and internationalists, labor and capital, the South and the North, in a common enterprise of global consequence. The Roosevelt consensus did not emerge fully formed. It was contested, messy, and sometimes contradictory. But it worked, and it worked for a generation. The challenge for the American left today is to understand why it worked, what made it possible, and what a comparable effort would require in our own moment.

II. What FDR actually built

The conventional story of FDR and foreign policy tends to focus on the dramatics: Lend-Lease, Pearl Harbor, the Grand Alliance, D-Day, Yalta. But the more important story, the one relevant to this moment, is about architecture. Roosevelt did not simply react to events. He constructed, piece by piece, institutional and political scaffolding that made collective action possible on a scale and over a duration that no previous American president had attempted.

That scaffolding had three key features. First, FDR integrated domestic and foreign policy in ways that his predecessors had never tried. The New Deal was not merely a program of economic recovery. It was, in retrospect, also a program of national capacity-building, of industrial mobilization, labor organization, and state institutional development that made the United States capable of fighting and winning a two-front world war. When Roosevelt spoke of the “arsenal of democracy,” he meant it literally: the factories, the workers, the unions, and the federal agencies that converted the American economy to wartime production in a matter of years. There was no separation between the domestic and the international. In many ways, they were the same project.

The scale of this integration is worth dwelling on. Between 1940 and 1944, American manufacturing output doubled. Factories that had been producing automobiles were retooled within months to produce tanks and aircraft. Shipyards that had been dormant during the Depression launched hundreds of Liberty ships in a single year. The federal government, through a combination of direct investment, procurement contracts, and labor policy, guided this transformation with a purposefulness and organizational capacity unmatched in American history. The war did not affect the economy. The economy was rebuilt around the war, and the political coalition that supported the New Deal was the essential precondition for that transformation. Workers who trusted Roosevelt’s labor policies were willing to accept wage controls. Industrialists who had opposed the New Deal came to understand that stabilizing capitalism required state partnership, not state opposition. The domestic and the international were, as FDR understood, inseparable.

Second, FDR built political coalitions that crossed traditional lines. This was his greatest political genius, and his admirers have mostly neglected it. The New Deal coalition was not simply a coalition of the left. It encompassed Southern Democrats who were deeply conservative on racial questions, urban labor machines that cared primarily about wages and working conditions, progressive intellectuals animated by internationalist idealism, and, crucially, business interests that had come to see the stabilization of the capitalist order as dependent on some degree of state intervention. FDR’s foreign-policy coalition was similarly heterodox: It included liberal internationalists, realist strategists, labor leaders who grasped the stakes of fascism, and, eventually, enough Republican internationalists to give his program bipartisan legitimacy. The Lend-Lease Act did not pass because liberals were united. It passed because Roosevelt had constructed a coalition large enough and durable enough to overcome the formidable opposition of the isolationist right.

This coalition-building required compromises that modern progressives would find uncomfortable. FDR accommodated Southern Democrats on civil rights in morally indefensible ways, and the wartime alliance with Stalin demanded a degree of realpolitik that sat uneasily with the Four Freedoms rhetoric. These are real stains on the record. But they should not obscure the essential lesson: that building a durable foreign-policy consensus in a democracy requires bringing people with you who do not start where you do. The alternative, a foreign policy built only on the votes and values of those who already agree, is not a consensus. It is a faction. And factions, however righteous, cannot sustain the kind of long-term national commitments that an engaged role in the world calls for.

Third, and perhaps most important, FDR tied his foreign policy to a moral vocabulary that resonated with ordinary Americans. The Four Freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear—were not merely rhetorical flourishes. They were a statement of political purpose that connected America’s international role to its domestic aspirations. The fight against fascism was also, as Roosevelt framed it, a fight for the kind of country America wanted to be. This moral consensus was what made sacrifice politically sustainable. Americans were not simply asked to offer up blood and treasure in defense of abstract geopolitical interests. They were asked to fight for something, something that made sense to them, something worth fighting for.

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.¹

The Four Freedoms speech was also a subtle and shrewd political document. By including “freedom from want” alongside the more conventional civil liberties, Roosevelt explicitly linked international engagement to the domestic welfare state. To fight for a world free from fear was also to fight for a world in which ordinary people had economic security, social protection, and a stake in the political framework. It was the ideological core of the New Deal coalition applied to international affairs: the argument that the same principles that justified the welfare state at home also justified an engaged, activist American role in the world.

The FDR consensus, in short, was not just a foreign policy. It was a political achievement of the first order: the construction of a coalition capable of sustaining that engaged, activist American role in the world through democratic means, over years and decades, in the face of significant opposition. That is precisely what American progressives need to build again.

III. How the consensus broke down

To understand what needs to be rebuilt, we need to understand what was lost, when, and why. The postwar liberal order rested on the foundations FDR laid, but it evolved in ways that distorted and ultimately undermined the original vision. The Cold War militarized American foreign policy in ways that Roosevelt himself might not have anticipated or approved. The national security state that arose after 1945 developed its own institutional interests, its own culture, and its own politics, increasingly insulated from democratic accountability and oriented toward the priorities of the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower famously warned against on his way out the door.

The distortions were visible early. The containment doctrine, as articulated by diplomat George Kennan in his initial formulation, was a sophisticated strategic concept that emphasized political and economic competition with the Soviet Union over military confrontation. But it was almost immediately transformed, through NSC-68 and the Korean War mobilization, into a doctrine of permanent military buildup that bore little resemblance to Kennan’s original intent. The result was a national-security establishment that had structural incentives to identify threats, expand its budgets, and resist democratic accountability, and that was capable of drawing the United States into conflicts, from Korea to Vietnam to countless Cold War proxy wars, that served the institutional interests of the security state far more clearly than they served the interests of the American people.

Vietnam was the decisive rupture. The war did not merely fail strategically. It shattered the liberal foreign-policy consensus from within. The same establishment that had built the postwar order—the Bundys, the McNamaras, the Rusks—prosecuted a war that was, by any honest accounting, a catastrophic moral and political failure. The antiwar left that emerged from Vietnam was correct in its judgment of that particular war, but the collapse of the liberal consensus left progressives without an alternative framework. What filled the vacuum was a mixture of residual antimilitarism, moralistic internationalism focused on human rights and democracy promotion, and, for a significant part of the left, a reflexive suspicion of American power that made serious engagement with questions of strategy and security nearly impossible and that has invariably followed the Democratic Party ever since.

The baby-boom generation, which came of age politically during Vietnam, was sharply divided between those who concluded that the war was an aberration in an essentially sound policy structure and those who concluded that it was a symptom of something deeply wrong with American militarism and imperial ambition. These two interpretations produced two distinct political cultures, both of which persist today and do not live up to the challenges of the present moment. The first culture is too credulous about the uses of military force and too quick to dismiss the costs of intervention. The second is too dismissive of the genuine threats that a disengaged America would face and too comfortable with a posture of critique that offers no constructive alternative.

The end of the Cold War provided a brief window of opportunity that was squandered. Rather than seizing the moment to build a new foreign-policy consensus suitable for the post–Cold War world, successive administrations vacillated between triumphalism and drift. The liberal internationalism of the 1990s, NATO expansion, humanitarian interventions, and the democratic peace thesis were real but insufficient: They lacked the domestic grounding that had given the FDR consensus its durability. It was a foreign policy of elites, constructed largely without democratic deliberation, resting on assumptions of American primacy that were already beginning to erode.

Then came September 11, and the disastrous overreach that followed. The Iraq War was not simply a strategic blunder. It was the final discrediting of the post–Cold War liberal interventionist framework. The war was sold to the public on pretenses, prosecuted with catastrophic incompetence, and defended long past the point where any honest assessment could justify it. Its costs, in lives, treasure, and American credibility, were staggering. The human toll alone demands honest reckoning: more than five thousand American service members killed, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead, millions displaced, and a region destabilized in such a way that consequences are still unfolding two decades later. And its political aftermath was the rise of a nationalist populism that rejected not just the Iraq War but also the entire project of American global engagement, making space for the most irresponsible forms of retrenchment and isolationism to flourish on both left and right.

We are living in the aftermath of all this. The foreign-policy establishment has lost public trust, and for good reason. The progressive left has inherited a deep and often justified skepticism of military power and interventionism, but without a coherent solution. The result is a politics in which the most important questions about America’s role in the world, questions that will shape the lives of millions of people, here and abroad, for decades to come, are being decided largely by default, by inertia, and by the path of least resistance.

IV. The case for progressive engagement

The temptation for progressives in this environment is to treat foreign policy as a distraction from the real work of domestic reform, or to default to a posture of skepticism and critique, opposing this intervention, cutting off that weapons system, questioning this alliance, without offering a coherent vision in its stead. This temptation must be resisted, for reasons both strategic and moral.

Strategically, progressives cannot govern effectively if they cede foreign and defense policy to the right. The Republican Party has shown, in its current form, a willingness to use foreign policy as a vehicle for the worst kinds of nationalism, imperialism, and authoritarian sympathy. A left that cannot articulate a better solution will find itself outmaneuvered, forced into reactive positions, and unable to translate electoral victories into durable policy change. The Biden administration’s experience of trying to manage a complex international environment while pursuing ambitious domestic reform illustrates both the possibilities and the limitations of governing without a strong public foreign-policy consensus. Without that consensus, every foreign-policy decision becomes a political liability, consuming oxygen that might otherwise fuel domestic priorities and making it harder to build the sort of sustained public support that transformative governance requires.

There is also a more immediate strategic consideration. The global environment of the 2020s is genuinely dangerous in ways that demand serious engagement, not avoidance. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has reestablished the possibility of large-scale territorial war in Europe for the first time in generations. China’s military buildup and increasingly assertive posture in the Pacific present challenges that have no easy answers but cannot be wished away. The proliferation of nuclear weapons technology, the destabilizing effects of climate change on fragile states, and the erosion of the international institutions that have managed these dangers for decades all represent genuine threats to the conditions under which progressive governance anywhere is possible. Progressives who care about the future cannot afford to look away from these realities.

Morally, the case for engagement is even stronger. The modern world presents genuine challenges that demand real progressive attention. Climate change is, among other things, a foreign-policy concern of utmost importance, requiring international coordination at a scale that makes the postwar institutions look modest by comparison. The global spread of authoritarian governance is a direct threat to the values that progressives profess, and the United States has both an interest and a responsibility in terms of how that struggle unfolds. The rise of China as a great power raises questions about the future of the international order that cannot be answered by rhetoric about peace and cooperation alone.

The good news is that the progressive tradition contains rich resources for this work. The FDR legacy is one. But there is also the tradition of democratic internationalism, the belief that America’s security is best served not by dominance but by the construction of rules, institutions, and relationships that make collective action possible. There is the tradition of labor internationalism, the understanding that workers’ interests are international in scope, that global supply chains and labor standards are foreign-policy issues, not merely trade issues. There is the tradition of anticolonial critique, the recognition that American power has often been exercised in ways that are unjust and counterproductive, and that a credible American foreign policy must reckon honestly with this history. These traditions are not always easy to reconcile. They exist in genuine tension with each other, and any honest progressive foreign policy will have to grapple with those tensions rather than paper over them. But they provide the raw material for a thoughtful and distinctive progressive foreign policy, if there is the political will to build one.

V. Defense spending and industrial policy: a progressive synthesis

No issue is more fraught for the progressive left than defense and matters of the military. As author Morris Janowitz observed, “A liberal ideology…holds that since war is essentially destructive, the best minds are attracted to more positive endeavors.”² The military budget, currently exceeding $850 billion annually, is the largest single item of discretionary federal spending, and the arguments for reducing it are not frivolous. The Pentagon’s procurement system is notoriously complex. Defense contractors extract rents from the public on an enormous scale. The revolving door of the Pentagon, the defense industry, and the Washington think-tank complex creates structural incentives for military solutions to problems that may not have military answers. Progressives who have spent decades fighting for social spending are understandably reluctant to endorse defense budgets that could fund universal pre-K, housing, and healthcare instead.

These concerns are legitimate. But the progressive critique of defense spending, as currently formulated, is insufficient as a policy framework. Opposing the defense budget in the aggregate does not actually constitute a defense policy. The question is not simply how much we spend but what we spend it on, for what purposes, under what conditions, and with what kind of democratic accountability. A meaningful progressive defense policy would not begin with a number—cut x percent of the Pentagon budget—but with a strategic assessment of what America actually needs to defend its interests and uphold its obligations, followed by an honest accounting of what the current defense establishment delivers and fails to deliver.

That honest accounting would reveal significant waste, but it would also reveal genuine capability gaps, aging infrastructure, a defense industrial base that has atrophied in some of the most critical sectors, and a military that has been asked to do far too many things far too often with consequences that rarely serve the interests of ordinary Americans. The lesson of Ukraine is instructive here: The capacity to produce artillery shells, anti-tank missiles, and air defense systems at scale proved to be enormously important, and the United States and its allies found themselves dangerously short of all of them. The strategic implications were stark: America’s ability to supply a partner nation fighting a conventional war, the most basic test of great-power defense capacity, was constrained by the state of its manufacturing base. Industrial capacity for national defense is not separate from industrial policy; it is a form of industrial policy, with all the economic and labor implications that it entails.

The deeper problem is that the collapse of American manufacturing has left the defense industrial base concentrated among a small number of large prime contractors who face little competitive pressure to innovate, keep costs down, or maintain the surge capacity that real security requires. The classic example is shipbuilding: The United States Navy, which once launched carriers and destroyers from a dozen competitive yards, now depends on a handful of yards for virtually all of its major surface combatants. When those yards fall behind schedule or over budget, there are no alternatives. The same pattern holds in aerospace, in munitions, in ground vehicles, and in the electronics supply chains on which all of these depend. Rebuilding this industrial base is a national-security imperative, but it is also a tremendous opportunity for both economic development and labor policy.

This is where FDR’s legacy is most directly relevant. The New Deal built state capacity. The wartime mobilization built industrial capacity. The two were inseparable. A progressive defense policy that takes the lessons of the FDR era seriously would not simply advocate for cutting the defense budget; it would advocate for restructuring the defense industrial base to make it more accountable, more productive, and more aligned with the interests of workers and communities rather than shareholders and executives. It would advocate for domestic content requirements in defense procurement, labor standards in defense contracting, and investment in the manufacturing workforce on which defense production depends. It would treat defense industrial policy as a subset of a broader industrial policy, one oriented toward rebuilding American productive capacity in sectors critical for national security and economic resilience.

As for the building blocks of actual industrial and defense policy: a major public investment program in domestic defense manufacturing, modeled after the Defense Production Act authorities used during the COVID-19 pandemic but applied systematically and at scale, with mandatory domestic content requirements for Pentagon procurement in essential categories including munitions, shipbuilding, and semiconductor components. A restructured defense acquisition process that breaks up the consolidation of the defense industrial base, which has shrunk from more than fifty prime contractors in the 1990s to just five today, through aggressive antitrust enforcement and procurement rules that favor competitive bidding over sole-source contracts. A GI Bill–style workforce development program for defense manufacturing trades, creating pathways into skilled industrial employment for workers in deindustrialized communities. And a dedicated office of defense industrial policy within the Department of Defense, with statutory authority and budget resources, charged with mapping supply-chain vulnerabilities and directing investments to fill them, with explicit labor standards and domestic sourcing requirements attached to every dollar it deploys.

For the defense budget: a rebalancing of the procurement portfolio away from extraordinarily expensive legacy platforms, like the F-35, which has cost $400 billion-plus and counting, and toward the capabilities that have proven decisive in recent conflicts, such as long-range precision munitions, drone systems, air and missile defense, and cyber capabilities. An increase in funding for diplomacy and development through the State Department and USAID, which together receive less than one-twentieth of the Pentagon’s budget, using the straightforward strategic logic that preventing conflicts is cheaper than fighting them.

For alliances: a formal burden-sharing agreement within NATO that ties American commitment levels to measurable European contributions, not as a threat but as a democratic accountability mechanism that makes the alliance’s costs and benefits legible to publics on both sides of the Atlantic. A new framework for allied industrial cooperation, modeled loosely after the Five Eyes intelligence arrangement, that allows allied democracies to coordinate defense production, share technology, and build collective industrial capacity rather than duplicating each other’s investments. An expansion of the alliance’s political mandate to include democratic backsliding within member states as a legitimate concern of collective governance, making clear that the alliance’s collective defense guarantee is bound to the democratic character of its members. And a formal congressional authorization framework for major alliance commitments, requiring periodic reaffirmation instead of relying solely on the open-ended treaty obligations inherited from 1949.

For democratic foreign-policy governance: a revived and strengthened War Powers Resolution with real enforcement mechanisms, closing the loopholes that successive administrations have exploited to conduct military operations without congressional authorization. A foreign-policy transparency act requiring the executive branch to publish, in unclassified form, the legal and strategic rationale for major foreign-policy decisions within a defined period after they are made. Mandatory conflict-of-interest rules for senior national-security officials that extend postgovernment employment restrictions to defense contractors, foreign governments, and foreign state-owned enterprises, addressing the revolving door that has corrupted the foreign-policy advisory process for decades. And a Foreign Policy Public Engagement Office charged specifically with bringing nontraditional voices, including labor, environmental, and community organizations, into the formal foreign-policy consultation process.

This synthesis—defense spending as industrial policy, industrial policy as a form of social investment—is not merely tactically clever. It reflects a genuine insight into the relationship between domestic strength and international position. America’s ability to play a constructive role in the world depends, ultimately, on the health of its economy, its institutions, and its democracy. An America that cannot produce semiconductors, cannot build ships, cannot manufacture the basic goods on which modern military capability depends, is an America whose international position is structurally weakened regardless of how large its nominal defense budget is. Progressives who care about America’s role in the world should care about rebuilding its industrial base, not as a concession to hawks but as a matter of both strategic logic and economic justice.

The political argument for this synthesis is also compelling. A progressive industrial policy that explicitly connects defense investment to good jobs, union wages, and community economic development has the potential to speak to these communities in ways that the current Democratic foreign-policy message does not. This is not cynical politics. It is the same move FDR made when he connected the arsenal of democracy to the New Deal coalition, the recognition that a durable foreign-policy consensus has to be rooted in the economic interests of the people who are asked to support it.

VI. Rebuilding the alliance system

The postwar alliance system, NATO above all, and the web of bilateral and multilateral security relationships in the Pacific are the most consequential institutional legacies of the FDR era. It is also under the most serious stress it has faced since the Cold War. The stress on the alliance system is not solely a function of Trumpian disruption, however. It also reflects genuine questions about the distribution of costs and responsibilities within alliances, about the relationship between American security guarantees and European strategic autonomy, and about the purposes for which alliance structures should and should not be used. These are legitimate questions, and progressives are right to raise them, but they are different from the question of whether alliances themselves serve American interests. A serious progressive engagement with NATO begins by differentiating the institution from some of the specific policies it has pursued.

Progressives have historically had an ambivalent relationship with military alliances. NATO has been a target of left-wing critiques, associated with American militarism, Cold War interventionism, and the projection of Western power. But the critiques must be distinguished from the institution. The core function of NATO, to provide a credible collective defense guarantee that makes major-power war in Europe prohibitively costly, has served the interests of ordinary Europeans and Americans for three-quarters of a century. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is the most important test of that guarantee in a generation, and the stakes of the outcome, for the principle of national sovereignty, for the security of American allies, for the credibility of collective defense arrangements worldwide, are not small. A world in which Russia successfully annexes Ukraine by force and faces no serious collective response from Western democracies is a world in which the architecture of collective security that has prevented major-power war since 1945 has been effectively dismantled. The consequences of that dismantling would fall first and hardest on the smallest and most vulnerable members of the international order.

A progressive approach to alliances would not be unconditionally supportive of NATO in all its dimensions. It would push for genuine burden-sharing, stipulating that European partners must develop the military and industrial capacities needed to assume primary responsibility for their own defense over time. It would insist on genuine congressional engagement with alliance commitments rather than their perpetuation through executive inertia. It would establish clear criteria for out-of-area operations, requiring explicit authorization and humanitarian justification rather than allowing the alliance to be used for any military purpose that a subset of members can agree on. And it would push for NATO to develop more serious engagement with the economic and political dimensions of security, including on issues like energy dependence, supply-chain vulnerabilities, and democratic backsliding within member states.

But it would also be honest about what alliances are for and why they matter. In an era of revanchist authoritarianism, the capacity for democratic nations to act collectively in defense of shared interests is not a liberal luxury. It is a precondition for the kind of international order in which progressive domestic politics is even possible. A world where great-power authoritarians can redraw borders by force, where small democracies cannot rely on the security guarantees of larger ones, where the rules and institutions of the postwar order have been effectively annulled, is not a world where progressive governance anywhere is more likely. It is a world with less. This is the fundamental strategic case for alliances, and it is one that progressives should be able to make clearly and without apology.

VII. Before the national security state: recovering democratic control

There is one structural reform that progressives have been reluctant to name directly but that the logic of democratic foreign policy requires: a total rethinking of the institutional architecture created by the National Security Act of 1947. That legislation, passed in the early months of the Cold War, was the founding charter of the modern American national security state. It created the Central Intelligence Agency, unified the military services under a new Department of Defense, and established the National Security Council; in doing so, it concentrated foreign- and defense-policy authority in the executive branch in ways that had no real precedent in American constitutional history. It was presented as a modernization, a rationalization of an unwieldy wartime apparatus into something suited for the permanent competition of the Cold War. What it actually did was build a parallel government, operating largely in secret, insulated from congressional oversight, and accountable primarily to itself.

The world before 1947 was not perfect, and no serious progressive is arguing for a naive return to some imagined pre-national-security-state innocence. The Roosevelt administration itself operated with considerable executive latitude during wartime, and some degree of executive flexibility in foreign and defense policy is both inevitable and appropriate. But the pre-1947 order did have features worth recovering. Congressional authority over war and foreign policy was more meaningful and more consistently exercised. The secretary of state was a genuine center of foreign-policy gravity rather than one voice among many in an NSC process dominated by the military and the intelligence community. There was no permanent peacetime intelligence bureaucracy with the institutional incentive and the operational capacity to conduct covert action abroad, overthrow governments, and shape the information environment at home. And foreign-policy decisions, precisely because they required more explicit congressional engagement, were more regularly subjected to public deliberation and democratic accountability.

The 1947 Act and its successors—including the CIA Act of 1949, the National Security Agency’s founding directives in the early 1950s, and the successive expansions of executive war-making authority from Korea through the post–September 11 Authorization for Use of Military Force—have devolved into a system in which the most consequential decisions about war, covert action, surveillance, and the use of force are made behind closed doors, by a small group of officials under the executive, with minimal congressional knowledge and essentially no public deliberation. The consequences of this system are by now well-documented: covert interventions that destabilized democracies and installed autocrats across Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia; surveillance programs of breathtaking scope directed at American citizens and allies alike; intelligence assessments manipulated to support predetermined policy conclusions; and a culture of secrecy that treats democratic oversight not as a constitutional obligation but as an operational inconvenience.

A progressive reform agenda would not simply tinker at the margins of this system. It would challenge its foundational premises. That means, concretely, restoring genuine legislative authority over covert action by requiring affirmative congressional authorization, not merely notification, for any covert program above a minimal threshold. It means establishing a genuinely independent and adequately resourced congressional intelligence oversight capacity, with staffers who have the clearances, the expertise, and the institutional backing to conduct real oversight rather than the performative variety that currently characterizes most of the intelligence committees’ work. It means revisiting the broad authorizations for the use of military force that have been stretched over decades to justify operations their original authors never contemplated, and replacing them with specific, time-limited, congressionally approved authorizations that require regular renewal. It means subjecting the National Security Council itself, currently operating as a largely parallel executive, to statutory definition, transparency requirements, and congressional oversight that the 1947 Act never envisioned would be necessary.

None of this is easy, and some of it will be resisted fiercely by the institutions whose prerogatives are at stake. The intelligence community, the uniformed military, and the national-security bureaucracy have powerful institutional interests in the preservation of their autonomy, and they have historically been adept at mobilizing those interests against reform. But the argument for reform is not just institutional or procedural. It is democratic. A foreign policy conducted in secret, by officials unaccountable to the public, in pursuit of objectives that cannot withstand public scrutiny, is not only bad policy. It is a violation of the democratic principles that American foreign policy is supposed to embody and promote. If the left is intent on building a new foreign-policy consensus grounded in democratic legitimacy, it has to be willing to challenge the institutional arrangements that make democratic legitimacy in foreign policy structurally impossible. That requires engaging seriously with the architecture of 1947, understanding what it was built for, what it has produced, and what a genuinely democratic alternative would look like.

VIII. What American military power is actually for

Articulating what we are against—endless war, liberal interventionism, isolationist retrenchment—is necessary but not enough. The harder and more important task is articulating what we are for: when American military power should be used, toward what ends, and in what forms. Without a clear answer to that question, the progressive foreign-policy project will remain a critique in search of a program, and the left will continue to be outmaneuvered by those who at least have a doctrine, however wrongheaded, to offer.

The starting point is a clean break from two failed models. The first is liberal interventionism: the belief, prevalent from the 1990s through the 2000s, that American military power could and should be used to remake societies, implant democracies, and resolve civil conflicts wherever they arose, if only the political will and military resources were sufficient. Iraq and Afghanistan have settled that question. Military force cannot build nations that have not built themselves, and the attempt to use it that way has cost the United States enormously in blood, treasure, and credibility. The second failed model is its mirror image: the reflexive anti-interventionism that treats any use of American military power as inherently imperialist and any forward military presence as inherently provocative. This posture, understandable as a reaction to the disasters of liberal interventionism, is not a strategy. It does not explain what happens when authoritarian great powers move to fill the vacuums that American withdrawal creates, nor does it offer any account of the legitimate security interests of democratic allies whose safety depends on credible American commitments.

A progressive doctrine of military power would be built around three core purposes, each more limited and more defensible than the ambitions of the liberal interventionist era. The first is deterrence of great-power aggression. The central strategic challenge of our moment is not terrorism, not failed states, and not the residual threats of the Cold War. It is the possibility that China moves militarily against Taiwan, that Russia extends its war beyond Ukraine, or that some combination of revisionist powers concludes that the costs of challenging the territorial status quo are lower than the benefits. Deterrence of these scenarios does not require American troops to fight and die for every inch of contested territory. It requires a credible military posture, forward-deployed naval forces, prepositioned equipment, robust alliance commitments, and the demonstrated political will to respond, all of which makes the calculus of aggression unfavorable before the first shot is fired. Deterrence is the least expensive and most effective form of military power, precisely because its purpose is to prevent wars from happening rather than to win them after they start.

The second core purpose is defense of the global commons. Freedom of navigation in international waters and airspace is not a luxury of American hegemony. It is the physical infrastructure on which the global economy runs: Roughly 90 percent of world trade moves by sea, and the sea lanes of the Western Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and the Persian Gulf are the arteries through which that trade flows. Maintaining freedom of navigation in contested waterways—above all in the South China Sea, where China’s territorial claims directly threaten international shipping routes—is a use of military power that can be justified on purely economic and legal grounds, independently of any ideological argument about the rules-based order. It also happens to be a mission for which naval power is ideally suited, and one that does not require the deployment of large ground forces or the prolonged occupation of foreign territory.

The third core purpose is bounded security assistance: helping partner nations defend themselves against external aggression or internal armed threats, without substituting American forces for local ones. This is the lesson that the left should draw from the Ukraine experience, and it is a lesson that cuts against the reflexive anti-interventionism of much progressive foreign-policy thinking. The United States did not send troops to fight Russia in Ukraine. It provided weapons, intelligence, training, and economic support that allowed Ukrainians to fight for their own country. That model, which the military calls security force assistance, is not without its own moral complexities and risks of escalation. But it is categorically different from the counterinsurgency campaigns and nation-building missions that have defined the post-9/11 era. It respects the sovereignty and agency of partner nations. It does not require open-ended American military commitments. And it can be made subject to genuine democratic oversight and clear conditions, including human-rights benchmarks and congressional-authorization mandates, in ways that covert operations and large-scale troop deployments cannot.

These three purposes imply two concrete programmatic commitments that a progressive foreign policy should be prepared to defend explicitly. The first is sustained investment in naval power, specifically in the submarine fleet, in long-range strike capabilities, and in the logistics infrastructure needed to sustain operations in the Western Pacific. This is not an argument for naval expansion as an end in itself. It is an argument that the form of military power best suited for deterrence and freedom of navigation in the Pacific is naval rather than land-based, and that the current naval shipbuilding program is inadequate for the strategic requirements it is supposed to meet. Progressives who care about industrial policy should note that increasing naval shipbuilding capacity would generate tens of thousands of skilled manufacturing jobs in communities that have been devastated by deindustrialization, creating a genuine political coalition around a genuine strategic priority.

The second is a reformed and democratized security-assistance program. The current framework for providing military aid and training to partner nations is a patchwork of statutory authorities, executive discretion, and congressional appropriations that lacks coherent strategic direction and meaningful human-rights accountability. Section 333 of the National Defense Authorization Act, the primary authority for security assistance, has been used to fund and train militaries that subsequently committed serious human-rights abuses, with insufficient consequences and inadequate oversight. What a progressive reform agenda would call for is a consolidated, transparent security-assistance framework with mandatory human-rights vetting, automatic suspension triggers when partner forces commit abuses, genuine congressional oversight of all major programs, and clear strategic criteria tying assistance to defined objectives rather than open-ended relationship maintenance. This is not an argument against security assistance. It is an argument for doing it honestly and accountably, in a way that can withstand democratic scrutiny and serve the progressive values the left professes.

What is notably absent from this doctrine is any mention of large-scale ground interventions, nation-building missions, or the use of military force to promote democracy or resolve civil conflicts in countries that do not directly threaten American security or alliance commitments. That omission is deliberate. The lesson of the post–Cold War era is not that military force is never justified. It is that the specific forms of military ambition that characterized that era, the belief that American ground forces could transform foreign societies if deployed in sufficient numbers with sufficient patience, were not just strategically mistaken but democratically unsustainable. A doctrine that is truthful about what military power can and cannot do, that concentrates on deterrence and the defense of the commons rather than transformation and nation-building, is both more strategically sound and more capable of commanding the democratic support it needs to endure.

IX. Building the new consensus: the political challenge

The hardest part is not the policy. It is the politics. A new FDR-style foreign-policy consensus cannot be decreed by think tanks or negotiated by elites in conference rooms. It has to be built by convincing ordinary Americans that the questions at stake are worth their attention, that the answers being offered are honest and coherent, and that the people offering them can be trusted with the responsibilities involved.

This is a challenge of political communication, of institutional design, and of democratic engagement that goes far beyond the usual practice of foreign-policy debate. Most foreign-policy discussion takes place among a tiny elite: academics, journalists, think tankers, congressional staffers, executive-branch officials, and the occasional retired general or ambassador. This discussion is significant: Expertise matters, but it is radically disconnected from the democratic processes that are supposed to give American foreign policy its legitimacy. The outcome is a foreign policy conducted, for the most part, without democratic deliberation, and that pays the price in the form of periodic popular revolts, of which the Trump movement is only the most recent and most alarming.

The disconnect between the foreign-policy elite and the democratic public is not just a communication problem that can be solved by better messaging. It is a structural feature of how American foreign policy has been made since at least the early Cold War, when the creation of the national-security state concentrated decision-making authority in the executive branch and its associated bureaucracies, largely insulating those decisions from congressional oversight and public deliberation. The result is a foreign policy that is, in important respects, constitutionally anomalous: conducted by a permanent bureaucracy with institutional interests of its own, insulated from electoral accountability, and legitimated primarily by the expertise of its practitioners rather than the consent of the governed.

Fixing this requires institutional reforms that go beyond the usual proposals for better public engagement or more transparency. It requires genuine reform of the war-powers architecture, restoring Congress’s constitutional role in decisions about the use of force. It requires reform of the intelligence community’s relationship with democratic oversight, making the classified world less able to shield its judgments from public scrutiny. It requires a serious effort to build foreign-policy expertise in civil-society organizations, labor unions, and advocacy groups that can aggregate public opinion on foreign-policy questions into genuine political pressure. And it requires overhauling the Washington think-tank ecosystem, which has become too closely tied to the national-security establishment and to foreign-government funders to serve its ostensible purpose as an independent source of policy analysis.

On the left specifically, building the new consensus requires a profound, sustained engagement with the parts of the progressive coalition that are most skeptical of American power: the antiwar movement, the Global South solidarity networks, the advocates for both Palestinian rights and the rights of communities affected by American military actions abroad. These voices raise real concerns that a serious progressive foreign policy must address, not simply dismiss. The history of American military intervention includes genuine atrocities and injustices that a credible progressive foreign policy must reckon with honestly, not defensively. At the same time, building a majority coalition requires going beyond the progressive base, reaching into groups that are not naturally progressive, including military communities, union households in defense-adjacent industries, and the substantial portion of the American public that is neither reflexively hawkish nor reflexively dovish but truly uncertain about what American engagement in the world should look like.

FDR did not build his consensus by preaching to the converted. He built it by meeting Americans where they were; speaking to their anxieties, their values, and their sense of what was fair and necessary; and constructing a political argument capacious enough to accommodate real disagreement within a shared framework of purpose. He also built it through institutions: labor unions, civic organizations, and local Democratic Party structures that could carry his message into communities and constituencies the national media did not reach. That institutional infrastructure has largely collapsed in American politics. Rebuilding it, at least partially, is a precondition for building the kind of durable consensus that foreign policy requires.

X. Toward a new architecture

What would a new FDR consensus actually look like in practice? Let us be clear about what it is not. It is not a return to the liberal interventionism of the 1990s, with its easy confidence in American power and its insufficient attention to the costs of its exercise. It is not the nationalist retrenchment of the populist right, with its contempt for alliances and its indifference to the fate of democracies abroad. And it is not the reflexive antimilitarism of parts of the left, which mistakes opposition to particular uses of force for a coherent strategy.

It is something harder and more interesting than any of these: a progressive internationalism that takes power seriously, that grounds American engagement in democratic values and democratic legitimacy, that integrates domestic and foreign policy as FDR did, and that is honest with the American public about the real costs and real stakes of America’s role in the world.

The specific contours of such a consensus will need to be worked out through political argument and democratic deliberation, through the messy, contested process by which democracies arrive at durable agreements. But some elements are already visible. A legitimate industrial policy that rebuilds American manufacturing capacity in sectors critical for both economic resilience and national defense. A reformed defense budget that cuts waste and contractor excess while investing heavily in the capabilities and the workforce necessary for genuine security. A commitment to the alliance system, reformed to be more equitable, more democratically accountable, and more authentically collective, not simply an instrument of American primacy. A foreign policy anchored in the defense of democratic governance and the rule of law, honest about the history of American power and committed to a different future. And, above all, a politics of foreign policy that treats the American public as democratic citizens capable of making valid judgments about valid questions, not as passive subjects of expert management.

There is also a generational dimension to this challenge that deserves explicit attention. The foreign-policy consensus that FDR built was sustained, after his death, by a generation that had lived through the Depression and the war, understood the costs of disengagement and division viscerally, and carried that understanding into the institutions and politics of the postwar era. That generation is gone. The generation that came of age during Vietnam, and that dominated foreign-policy debate for the following half century, is passing from the scene. The generation now entering its peak political years came of age during the Iraq War, the financial crisis, and the political tumult of the Trump era. Its relationship to American institutions, including foreign-policy institutions, is one of deep skepticism, and for good reason.

To build a new consensus with and for this generation, we must take that skepticism seriously rather than dismiss it. We must be honest about past failures, not in a spirit of self-flagellation but in a spirit of true accountability that can serve as the foundation for renewed trust. We must make the case for international engagement based not on American exceptionalism or the automatic virtue of American power but on concrete interests, democratic values, and honest assessments of what engagement can and cannot accomplish. And we must offer a vision of America’s role in the world that is genuinely inspiring, that connects to the aspirations of ordinary people, not to the institutional interests of a foreign-policy establishment that has spent much of the past generation failing.

None of this will happen easily or quickly. The obstacles are real: institutional inertia, the power of entrenched interests, the difficulty of building coalitions across genuine disagreements, and the sheer complexity of the international environment. But the obstacles FDR faced in the 1930s—an isolationist public, a deeply divided political coalition, a world rapidly descending into catastrophic violence—were no smaller. He built his consensus anyway, because the stakes demanded it and because he had the political vision and the democratic craft to do it.

The stakes today demand no less. The world is at an inflection point, between a rules-based order that, for all its imperfections, has sustained more peace and more prosperity than any previous one in human history, and an emerging disorder in which great-power competition, authoritarian aggression, and the absence of effective multilateral institutions create conditions of danger and instability that will fall hardest on the most vulnerable, here and abroad. Progressives who care about the future, who care about the climate, about democracy, about economic justice, about the possibility of a decent life for people everywhere, cannot afford to leave foreign policy to others. They need to engage with it, argue about it, take it seriously, and ultimately build the political consensus around it that democratic governance requires.

That is the work of this moment. It is, in its way, the work that FDR would recognize. And it is the work worth doing.

1. Franklin D. Roosevelt, State of the Union Address, January 6. 1941.
2. Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier (Free Press, 2017), p. 105.